New UK project aims at safe autonomous navigation

UK-based autonomous systems provider ASV Global is leading a new £1.2 million research project in partnership with compatriot BMT to enhance safety and reliability of autonomous navigation, through the use of deep learning machine vision systems trained with simulated and real-world data.

Partly funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, this project aims to enhance situational awareness enabling the USV to operate in extreme and congested marine environments. Improved situational awareness concerns both the autonomy onboard and the remote human supervisor.

The Synthetic Imagery training for Machine Vision in Extreme Environments (SIMVEE) project will build upon ASV’s autonomous collision avoidance and path planning strategy, while it will use BMT’s REMBRANDT simulator to train and validate ASV Global’s vision algorithms to detect and classify objects at sea.

The combination of real world and simulated data to train deep learning algorithms is expected to improve the reliability of the existing system extending safe operations into complex environments "with a wide range of objects to detect, classify and avoid."